Radioactive Time: A Politics and Poetics of Asian/Indigenous Relation

Noon hour talk at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, 6331 Crescent Road, UBC Campus

by invitation

In this talk, Larissa Lai considers the possible forms that relation between Asian and Indigenous peoples can take in the present moment, on North American soil, given the complicated relationship both have had to European colonial presence. As colonized subjects and as members of settler culture, Asian Canadian writers and thinkers can make no claims to innocence. Through a reading of the Movement Project’s How We Forgot Here, David Khang’s performance piece How to Feed a Piano, and Marie Clements’s Burning Vision, Lai proposes that we need to attend more deeply to indigenous understandings of the term “respect” and that such understandings may actually require the embrace of a non-linear model of time.